Japanese Takeout, or the Continuity of Cultural Narrative

Dearest friends,

Consider the burrito. It is a tortilla wrapped around a delicious filling. Now, we can derive another idea from this core burrito concept – the sushirito. A sushirito, or sushi burrito, is a burrito with rice instead of tortilla and raw fish as the filling. Imagine a world where the burrito suddenly ceased to be, but the sushirito would remain. Over time, the name and idea of burrito would come to be associated with the sushirito, since only the sushirito remains as a reminder of the burrito past. The sushirito would be the burrito. And then no one would know the  burrito, only the sushirito.

There are only so many narratives that exist. We appropriate from the past.

People want to fill their egg role.

The HR person is not just the HR person. Some of what they do comes from economic or practical necessity. But much of it is simply passed down, unquestioned tradition. People act in a certain way because that’s Just The Way Things Are. An HR person is the vessel of the clerisy long dead.

Much is made of pivotal shifts in economic conditions, but so long as the cultural identity survives, these can be adapted to. It is not the way of life that defines the man, but the man who makes a way of life amenable to himself.

So long as an identity survives, the people can change. To propose the reverse is fundamentally wrongheaded. Economics is merely how a people sustain themselves. But it does not constitute what *values* they have. Compare the Plains Indians to the Cossacks. Both were people of wild, horsed steppes, fundamentally nomadic. But the Indians are a dying people and the Cossacks are not. It is not a story of economic obsolescence. The Cossacks no longer sustain themselves with the old ways. The world has changed to a world of steel and factories. But the essential character remains. On a steel horse, he rides. It is the spirit of a people that endures. When economic conditions change, so long as the identity lives, people find a way to adapt their mores to their circumstances.

The aristocratic identity is alive and well, despite the obsoletion of living off land rents. The traditional form of sustenance died out. But the idea of living above labor survived into the concept of the rentier, a repackaging of the idea of shunning labor. When that also ceased to be viable, the aristocrat took on the form of the professional, an adaptation of the idea of the noblesse de robe. They arbitrarily carved a certain kind of labor as “intellectual” and “professional” and therefore not work. The similarities were used to bridge the gap. A modern person of the upper middle class has almost nothing in common with an old style aristocrat – except for cultural continuity. They are much less chop, much more suey. And this is the way things go. But if you crush a people’s spirit, it’s over. Culture changes as a Ship of Theseus, but when it sinks, it sinks.

And then you’re drowning.

Cultural identities aren’t useless. They’re life scripts. They help you navigate life. They structure its trials and travails. They overcome decision paralysis. They give meaning. They say – this is what life is, this is what life’s about. They tell you how to butter your toast.

You butter it wrong, by the way. Blasted knave.

And… cultures provide customary restraints. Rules. Laws. Taboos. They mark some things as off the table. Many sins can be thus avoided. Some taboos are obsoleted by time. But many taboos have to do with people, and people never change. Human nature remains what it was. In forgetting traditional culture, we forget everything we knew about what people were.

That’s significant.

This all started when Babs shitposted a question at me: What’s with the Asians that act like… disadvantaged Negroes?

The truth is a little deeper than that. Ghetto culture is not black culture. As Sowell points out, much of it is taken from white cracker culture. What Asians take from Black culture removes one more layer of cultural veneer off the underlying thing. What is the thing that chavs, ghetto blacks, white trash, and chiggers share in common? It’s the essence underlying all of those cultures. Ghetto culture is deracinated prolishness. It is prole nature without any guidance or restraints to channel those energies and desires somewhere productive. It is prole culture without any of the taboos against the worst poisons. That’s how it can be so similar across time and space. What all of them are practicing is the emergent behavior of people on the bottom without identity-behaviors to constrain it. It is pure class tendency, raw and harsh. When medieval peasants… misbehave, it is not in imitation of blacks centuries in the future. But their unique cultures provide answers to the problems posed by these class tendencies. Memes adapt to their memetic niches. The solidarity and clannishness of the holler protects against the corrosion of dumb shit. The humble white man remains upright because of a cultural narrative prizing work. Without these little stories, you collapse back into deracinated prolishness. Why *should* you work when all your efforts will amount to nothing anyways? Even the hardiest and most diligent laborer earns a pittance for their troubles. But a culture that thought that way would go extinct. It is only when the layers of culture are removed that the ugly question rears its head once more.

So what is globohomo? Globohomo is deracinated aristocracy. It is the tendency of the elite to move left, subverting the existing order, combined with its international and cosmopolitan outlook. By nature, elites of all countries have more in common with each other than their people. But being connected to your people is necessary to maintain asabiya, and peoples that lacked asabiya were relegated to the dustbin of history. Within a culture, there will be adaptations to draw the people and the elite closer. Noblesse oblige. Shared rituals. A common cult. But these adaptations are not cross cultural. Prussia had its soldier kings and warrior junkers eating beans and sleeping alongside foot sloggers, and while this fulfills the same cultural niche as, say, WASPs taking townies under their wing, ala Our Kids, they are not the *same behavior*. It’s just convergent evolution. A mixing of all elites does not result in the practice of all of these rites, but the practice of none of them. Globohomo unleashed.

And when globohomo is unleashed, elite power knows no checks and limits. Just as a wolf pack let loose soon kills off all its deer, so too do the elites salt their own soil. For the elite do not feed themselves, but rely on value extracted from the proles. Starvation ensues.

Starving for a sushirito,
Monsieur le Baron